"Raising four very different daughters on her own in rural Arkansas wasn't easy for Miss Pearly Bell. And she's always regretted that the sisters went their separate ways for good - and never wanted to see each other again. But when Pearly is stricken with a terminal illness, she summons them all home - determined to somehow help them get right with each other and forgive... But that means dealing with past secrets and lies first"--

Twenty-eight-year-old protagonist Tommy Lee Tyson steps off the Greyhound bus in his hometown of Swamp Creek, Arkansas, a place he left when he was eighteen, vowing never to return. Yet fate and a Ph. D. in black studies force him back to his rural origins as he seeks to understand himself and the black community that produced him.

"Twelve Gates to the City is the much-anticipated sequel to Black's acclaimed debut, They Tell Me of a Home. In this novel, Sister assumes the voice of the narrator, speaking from the spirit realm, telling her brother TL things he could have never known about their family. She constructs the story as a series of spiritual revelations, exposing to readers both who she was in the years of TL's absence and how every event in his life was an orchestration...

Sensitive autobiography of a black woman who retains her personal "human dignity."